Baseball fans rejoice. Mel Allen is alive and well and living at Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Animation. He is a fraction of his original size, made of Plasticine and needs the help of dozens of interchangeable clay chins in order to yell his trademark ‘How about that?’

Thanks to Cuppa creative director Dave Thomas and friends, Smilin’ Mel is back where he belongs – on This Week in Baseball.

When Playback caught up with Mr. Allen, who has been dead for quite some time now, his new incarnation as a clay puppet was placed carefully in a Cuppa studio with a camera pointed at him. His set is a mini-studio with a clock to his left and an On Air sign to his right. His being there represents about three weeks of very hard work by Thomas, producer Adam Kennedy and Allen’s personal stylist Shelley Smith, who also doubled as an animation assistant to Thomas.

Major League Baseball, which produces This Week in Baseball, contacted Cuppa about producing a new claymation intro, extro and bumper for the show. Production began in early June.

Construction on mini-Mel took a lot of time and care, says Thomas. mlb was very insistent the puppet be a high-quality likeness of the man. The organization sent Cuppa a number of vhs cassettes of Allen. Stills were then isolated from the tapes, giving Thomas an image to work toward.

‘We went through footage from the ’40s to the ’80s and we decided to go from his early days when he was young and vibrant,’ says Thomas. ‘That kind of period of nostalgia was in the 1950s so the style things we pulled were all from that era. He was a very snappy dresser and we made sure that was reflected that in the costume and the puppet.’

Before discussion could even begin as to how the puppet would look, its initial construction was the first issue at hand. Thomas put together a metal skeleton with socket joints housed within for movement. His hands were made from a Sculpey clay mold so that if the hands were damaged a replacement set could be put together quickly. Thomas and Smith worked together sculpting the head.

Smith designed Allen’s clothing for the shoot.

‘I think the challenge on this one for me was to make a realistic suit. I was very keen on trying to have a realistic jacket and shirt and tie and hat,’ says Smith. ‘We’ve given him a nice, big, fat, aluminum block armature and we blocked it with stick foam to give Dave something to hang on to.

‘Then to give him a little bit of puffiness to make sure he doesn’t look like a solid thing underneath his jacket, he has upholstery foam wrapped all the way around him. Then we just started blocking out the costume. The costume pieces are built exactly the same as you’d build a shirt for a human being, except they’re about one-hundredth the size.’

Before Thomas and Kennedy could begin animating, mlb had to approve Thomas’ puppet.

‘They saw our rendition of the puppet and they were freaked out a little bit because it looks a lot like Mel Allen. They were really happy about that,’ says Kennedy.

‘Their actual words were ‘It’s spooky,’ ‘ adds Thomas. ‘Because they worked with [Allen], I was expecting a lot of changes, like he’s too fat or too thin. The only thing they suggested from the first visual was to give him a little bit less teeth. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop, but they loved it right from the start. I was pretty happy.’

With the puppet well received and the mlb sound bites in, the animation process could now begin. The challenge in animating the puppet, as with any stop-motion claymation entity, was getting the mouth to reflect the words of the sportscaster supplied by mlb.

Allen, says Thomas, spoke very articulately and had a somewhat over-exaggerated mouth movement when speaking. This arguably made Thomas’ job easier, as it is more difficult to emulate a mumbler’s lip movements. Thomas built a chin out of clay and made a press mold out of it to duplicate the chin. In total, Thomas made around 30 Mel Allen mouths, with each one making up a different letter of the alphabet, and attached them to the puppet as needed.

‘What I would do was take my Xacto and slice down the sides into his chin, which is a clear veneer, so it is easy to tear without damaging the puppet,’ says Thomas. ‘I’d slice down the sides of his mouth, grab a second mouth and drop it in there, grab fresh clay, seal it together and clean up the lip line.’

He says it was a challenge to line up the words with the mouth movements.

‘We got the dialogue broken down and over the course of the frames you get a visual of what the dialogue looks like. So visually you see how it sounds and then I know in each frame where the notes should be sitting. And if I follow this exactly, when we synch it up with the audio it should be seamless.’

In terms of animating the rest of the puppet, Thomas says it’s easier because he stays stationed in front of a microphone, but he still has to move somewhat, at least while speaking.

‘I like constant body movements,’ says Thomas, adjusting puppet Mel’s eyebrow ever so slightly to demonstrate his point. ‘As human beings we never stay perfectly still. Sometimes I move things so slightly you can’t really even see it; I just sort of feel the shift in the puppet and it builds up over a series of frames and you get a really gentle swaying action or a slight nod.’

To give the viewer some further eye candy, the On Air sign behind Allen lights up and one of the hands on the clock ticks as he speaks.

‘Just a little bit of realism,’ smirks Thomas.

With the Mel Allen material now on air with This Week in Baseball, Thomas, Smith and Kennedy can relax for a little while and wait for the praise to flow freely from the States. Three weeks worth of work amounted to a total of 12.5 animated seconds, but Thomas feels it was worth his time and looks forward to similar challenges in the months to come.

‘Each character is its own beast. Every one is a little bit different,’ says Thomas. ‘It was totally fun and a lot of fun trying to bring him to life.’

And somewhere Mel Allen watched it all. Although he could not be reached for comment, we are sure, after seeing the finished product and knowing he’s back on the air with This Week in Baseball, he said something along the lines of, ‘How about that? Now if someone would just sculpt me some damn legs…’ *

-www.cuppacoffee.com